Calling Out Homeland's Bipolar BS

Make that two straight Emmys for Claire Danes, just in time for the start of Homeland’s third season this Sunday night. As CIA agent/doomed lovebird Carrie Mathison, Danes is formidable yet vulnerable; heroic yet infantile; white-hot yet remote; and above all else, simultaneously sympathetic and utterly grating. Carrie’s mentor Saul, played by the ever-reassuring Mandy Patinkin, describes her as the “smartest and the dumbest person I’ve ever met.” It’s the kind of role we’ve come to expect from Famous Actors on Those Channels We Pay Extra to Watch.

What makes Carrie Mathison such a provocative role, as well as a remotely plausible device, is that her flaws stem from mental illness. Carrie is bipolar, which in strict clinical terms means she’s a genius lady who both sees things that others can’t and, just as often, sees things that aren’t there. Her flights of inspiration are indistinguishable from manic episodes with psychotic tinges. That’s how Carrie can be both her team’s strongest asset and yet a total liability. It’s how she can totally lose herself in her work while always running the risk of losing touch with reality through this very immersion. We get the rush of invention, the oldest-trick-in-the-book conflation of brainsick with brilliant, while leaving ample room for the sadness that surrounds Carrie in her failings. Then something (literally) blows up or almost blows up, at which point she’s vindicated, though only sometimes in the eyes of her colleagues.

Irony: When the audience sees that what Carrie sees is real, we’re left to conclude that the whole world has gone mad, and only the madwoman can fathom this possibility. Now who’s crazy, huh? Find out next week.

If I sound somewhat dismissive of the inner workings of Carrie Mathison, now might be a good time to announce this as a semi-first-person essay. I was diagnosed in college, some fifteen years ago. I’m pretty sure that, from the outside, I exhibit a generically Carrie-like personality. My moods swing wildly, I go fast and talk too much when I’m excited, my funks are impenetrable, I’ve found some success in life despite being pretty obviously unstable. Newsflash: There’s a lot I don’t broadcast, plus a lot of messy in-between territory, that’s harder to retrofit into acceptable professional or social behavior.

Yet you don’t need a special DSM badge to know that the mind, especially when it misfires, is nuanced in ways that Carrie doesn’t give us. Sure, every case is different, but Carrie is remarkably easy. She’s up, she’s down. She’s right, she’s wrong. If only the world could get on her level, get in step with her rhythms. Then everyone, including Carrie, would be safe forever. Homeland’s highs and lows are frequently about the viewer’s opinion of Carrie at that moment, not necessarily Carrie’s state of mind. You have to wonder how much interest Homeland really has in bipolar disorder if it’s not a narrative goldmine.

Put another way: Don’t laud Danes for her acting when Carrie Mathison is a formula that primes the dramatic pump—not much of a person and not even a decent approximation of the condition. It’s not as black and white as Carrie and there’s plenty that is wildly mundane and yet equally wrenching. The loss of perspective is as central to my internal monologue as my ability to solve the world’s problems when I get going. It’s far worse television, to be sure. Yet sometimes I worry that Carrie Mathison exists only to rationalize the topsy-turvy structure of Homeland.

And then there’s the incessant use of atmospheric, post-bop jazz to connote both seriousness and unpredictable creativity. Carrie is jazz, jazz is Carrie. The show’s intro music captures the washed-out severity of both Carrie’s condition and the post-9/11 nation it must save. The more lively soundtrack is her mind on the go, riffing, improvising, going to that forbidden place where rationality and imagination get all tangled up in a dangerous dance of love. Rules were made to be broken. This isn’t a woman with a problem, it’s a Way of Being. It’s no better than using jazz to help brand liquor. In trying to decode Carrie’s condition through her taste in music and vice-versa, Homeland ends up caricaturing both.

And yet at the same time, some things about Carrie are too good, too pure, too worthy of audience identification to muddy with this crazy stuff. Throughout the show’s two seasons, there’s nothing more inexplicable, mysterious, and moving than Carrie’s unbreakable bond with Brody who, MILD SPOILER ALERT, has done her dirty in all sorts of ways. It’s true love, it’s the chink in Carrie’s inhuman (or super-human) armor, it’s what makes the show a story about feelings as well as one about bombs. At the end of season two, Carrie was too blinded by love to anticipate utter catastrophe. Only love can save her from herself which is to say, make her just another CIA agent.

Except from my standpoint, every time they get back together, or she pines for him, I see nothing but straight-up compulsion. It’s poor impulse control, one of mania’s most telling features. A bipolar character could hardly be more literal, and yet here we are, even more credulous about Carrie’s libido than we are about her nose for bad guys. The show has hinted that she likes her wild nights out. Why are we supposed to feel any more confident about her and Brody?

Maybe that’s why Homeland bugs me so much. It’s extremely hard for me to enjoy a character whose bad judgment is selectively pathologized. Only a singular nut-job would make an ass of herself in the halls of the CIA, no matter how right she was. But anyone can repeatedly go back to a liar with more baggage—and arguably a bigger disaster in his head—than she has. If Claire Danes really were getting to the bottom of Carrie Mathison, Homeland would call even more of her behavior into question. We would feel even better about her, and ourselves, if it did turn out that love was true and conquered all disease. But that would mean putting Carrie, not what she stands for, front and center. And then we would have quite a different show on our hands.

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